Culture Change at Google

Sorry no. You’re overestimating the importance of techies here. Techies were the first on the web but in no way were techies critical for Google’s growth. Heck I was in junior high in Canada when I first came across Google and our librarian thought Yahoo was the better approach because manual expert indexing was surely better - we may have been nerds but none of us cared about open source. Google was just a novel technology that was better than its predecessors. And in terms of what made Google a success was figuring out AdSense. Without that Google would have died.

> However, one has to notice that Google has lost the upper hand over the web since ChatGPT came about.

That’s a nice claim but there’s no actual objective indication that’s actually true yet. It may well be true that the inflection point happened but please point to concrete data suggesting this rather than a blind assertion.

> The glorious USSR lasted 80 years on the remains of their former glory (and on the remains of food that was still produced). I just hope Google’s descent will be less painful, hopefully overnight.

The glorious USSR arguably came back around under Putin’s regime (call it whatever but it’s a very Soviet style political and social culture again).

Google is a massive player in the search space - bigger than MS was with operating systems in the 90s and MS still maintains its healthy dominance in that space for laptops/desktops even though Apple is the “cool” one and ships a lot of iOS devices and Google ships a lot of Android devices and only marginally beats out Windows market share (38% vs 31% vs 17% for ios [1]).

Anyway, you don’t like Google. We get it. But none of this has any relevance about whether open sourcing sunsetted products would in any way alter their trust in a broader sense - their customer base hasn’t been tech heavy since GMail took over from Hotmail (maybe even before then) and I think you’re over thinking how much influence tech nerds have especially as the broader community has gotten more technically adept than they were at the beginning. People now ask their “techie” friends for advice where techie now means I buy and use a lot of electronics gadgets and software tools and not I’m an engineer working in the field.

Indeed in the critiques you outlined of why you don’t like their income streams, nowhere do you even bother mentioning any sunsetted products you thought would be good. If anything, the lesson business leaders probably take away from what happened at Google is that letting engineers make product decisions is a bad idea and results in products being launched without strategy that then hurts the company image because you can’t keep running unsustainable products indefinitely if you’re trying to maintain some semblance of fiduciary responsibility. This is because they look at Facebook and Apple and Microsoft who rarely if ever cut products and only do so if they’re changing strategy drastically or there’s no significant user base (for Apple since they primarily do hardware this is easier and just means they don’t do refreshes of a failed product line or postpone that refresh for a few years).

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_sys...

That and my department of about a dozen can't justify the cost to upgrade to their more enterprise focused, cloud ready new version Viya, but there's not really an upgrade path for 9.4 other than minor maintenance releases. Since no young new hires come in with SAS experience and the whole thing seems like a ticking clock, we decided just supporting Python for new development is a better plan.

And yet, for centuries people have done it.

It's easy to create a big company without a stable business model that refuses to take the right risks when meaningful competition and regulation do not exist, and there are long periods of unconventional monetary policies (QE, ZIRP). Will the company last. Question for the reader to decide.

For example, Big Company A has survived for 172 years by taking the "risk" of hiring journalists to produce news. Big Company B has survived for 25 years by not hiring journalists and instead using the product of Big Company A's employees as bait to lure in ad targets. What "risks" did Big Company B take, if any. Were they the "right" ones. Let the reader decide.

Big Company B just seems like a giant leech. What happens when the blood supply from Big Company A is exhausted. Find another host?

As for the folks Big Company B did hire to share in the immense bounty, as it happens they are just a non-essential expense that can be cut at any time. Some of them brag online about how they only work two hours a day. They loved the benefits. They saw no evil. But what risk was taken in hiring them. Question for the reader to decide.

Be like Chad Hurley.